SE's active (and non-active) role in the erosion of FFXIV PVP
This will be long. I will do my best to separate the key points.
Some background: i was once heavily involved with poker. Poker is quite similar to FFXIV pvp in that both are niche games and both revolve around certain types of players to function. Both games require a certain lifeblood or you cannot even play.
Now, the moment the accessibility of the game is restricted or the players are mistreated things start going sour for everyone involved. Unfortunately that's where i see where ffxiv pvp is headed for.
My key issues:
1. If you keep interfering with players and their roles, eventually they will lose trust in you and stop playing those roles.
In a niche community where the population is already pretty low and the skill cap and responsibilities of a healer in PVP are higher than in PVE, healers are an ever-dwindling number. If you can, go back and read the original thread about the CS nerf. Count how many of those healers said they wouldn't be playing anymore and compare it to how many were happily willing to go along with the changes. No one would be foolish enough to think PVP will be attracting more healers after this change.
But really, it's not just about healers losing one specific skill. It's that SE repeatedly keeps marginalizing them to the point where it's not even fun to play the role anymore. A friend of mine said it best today in that it's important to keep every role enjoyable along with maintaining each respective skill cap. Good players thirst for a way to maximize their playing ability. But if you continue to limit a role through varying means (aetherflow nerf) and then eventually take away one of its highest utility abilities (CS), you reduce its skill cap and as a consequence, drive away the players who enjoyed playing those high capacity roles.
Healers are scarce already. Yet SE just lowered their skill cap because certain players aren't able to have their way with them (when no one should). But instead of rewarding players and encouraging others to try out a tough job, they get punished. It's demoralizing and a huge roadblock for many players who might want to try out being a healer. Why bother when you'll probably get nerfed?
2. SE relies upon misguided complaints from players to make very harsh changes to the PVP environment.
The healers being "overpowered" argument is not something i cared to inject myself into because i never, ever, ever, thought that SE would listen. I thought it was obvious that many other factors decide a battle. Let's list some of the possible reasons why it would be hard to kill a healer.
- Individual skill level of the players in the attacking/defending party.
- Disparity in gear between the attacking and defending party.
- Competence/execution of the attacking/defending group.
- Actual potency of the spells healers use and the dynamics of stacking their abilities.
- Actual potency of the skills the attacking party uses and the dynamics vs stacked healing abilities.
I could go on but let's be direct. The primary reason is skill level and how good a player actually is. Some players are better than others, and in many cases worlds apart. There's a reason why bluegartr beat T9 ages ago while some have yet to beat T5; not everyone has the same skill level. Unfortunately, if you approach balance issues while overlooking this aspect, skill abilities will of course seem like the main culprit when it comes to class balance.
The big problem is that so many of these complaints were from people who had very little to no experience when it came to healing classes. And almost all the people who came to defend healers were the ones who actually played the jobs themselves day in and day out. It's, again, part of why i never thought SE would listen to the former group, but now that it's happened it's mind-boggling. How can the complaints of the least experienced and knowledgeable be prioritized over the ones with the most understanding? If you continue to listen to the inexperienced without looking at the big picture then you can never have game balance that's actually balanced; these things will always be predicated on complaints that don't consider the entire context of everything going on.
3. SE doesn't seem concerned about fixing egregiously flawed matchmaking systems. It's actually by design.
For both events the queue times are awful and only getting worse. When you have tons of players all playing pvp, these issues are quite easily masked; there are enough games to go around for everyone. But when the numbers die out, so do the games because the matchmaking design is flawed to begin with.
For frontlines, the GC vs GC thing is pretty rough. On my DC, players flock to maelstrom because it wins the most. But this makes the numbers imbalanced meaning too many players queue up for mael and not enough queue up for adders/flames. It's a dual effect that greatly extends the wait times for FL. I know a lot of players are suggesting things like better incentives to stay with their GC but let's be real: there is no substitute for winning. And if you give one place even a minor GC advantage, people will switch in droves for that small edge.
For wolves den, this whole matchmaking system is a complete disaster. Over the past couple weeks i've had several queues of over 200 minutes each. One person i know had a queue for 280 minutes. This is all for a two minute match, on average. Can anyone at all answer me what is fun about this? What "game" would ever make you wait that long for that little gameplay?
My server has a reputation for having a very active pvp community but even now we can't really overcome the matchmaking system. We should be able to get games on demand, and waiting even 10 minutes for a 2 minute match is bad, let alone 3+ hours. As it is the MM system is both outdated and irrelevant because it's the same people always queuing up and fighting against each other anyway. We are just forced to wait greatly extended periods of time to do so. MM doesn't balance anything if i'm going to end up fighting the same person i would have matched up against an hour beforehand.
People want to play the game. You have to wait hours to do so. Even if you have 8 players doing 4v4 against each other you are still at the mercy of the MM system. We should never have to wait more than 5 minutes for a 2 minute match. Waiting for hours is unfathomable. And i wouldn't have used such strong words if it were not for a recent Q/A that basically stated that they weren't focused on making any den improvements because they were worried about splitting the player pools between den and FL.
WHAT???????????????????????????????????
If you are worried about player "fragmentation", then why do the GC vs GC thing? Why force players into awful queue times in den? Why is there such a lack of cultivating and encouraging players to do pvp? Why not give allied seals for FL? Why not give soldier and myth for den? Fragmentation is ignoring the current queue systems for both events and letting it continue to deny access to pvp. Fragmentation is maintaining this damaging matchmaking system and watching it kill player interest in WD until it's no longer salvageable. You don't fix something by squeezing the life out of it. This is something i find to be the worst issue of all because there is a massive, willful negligence here in ignoring WD based on a very flawed premise.
I likened this game to poker in the beginning because the similarities involve games with, at times, very liquid player pools. Both games have a certain scarcity of players but the managers for those games are innately aware they need to put people in seats, and once they're in there you don't mess with them. When possible they encourage and grow and build the player base. But you don't get that here with this game.
I have seen poker games grow. I have seen them develop into something very solid over time But i have seen more of them fail. Flash in the pan popularity doesn't grow into more if you don't start with a strong foundation. Very rarely do players come back after most of the player base has moved on. And here's the thing: poker players are junkies with very limited options. If they come back it's because they had nowhere else to go. We are playing an online computer game where every single one of us has myriad options to move on to. WoW. Destiny. League. Dota. Whatever. It is far easier to see a player move on to something that's better and not come back. I very much fear that once the well has dried up, any pvp fixes will be too little and too late.
This will likely be the first and last post in make in this thread. Read it, ignore it, argue, do whatever you like. Or if you agree, help make some noise. I just hope that the devs read this because without a doubt these are the main issues affecting pvp in ffxiv. And for this game's pvp to get better these are the things that need to change.
